Fairy Tales
by LGold
Summary: Jenny hated fairy tales.


How to begin? How the hell _do_ you write a personal post-mortem, anyway? I sure don't know. Guess I don't have sufficient experience of this sort of thing. I'll have to pick it up as I go along.

Once upon a time-

Ugh, no. Not even ironically am I going to use that.

I've always hated stories that begin that way. It's a deep-seated, almost Freudian thing, I guess. God knows what Rupert would have done if I'd ever told him that, in those words. Polished his glasses out of their frames, probably – but I never got to tell Rupert that.

Anyway. Fairy tales. Once-upon-a-times: the reason behind the repugnance, by Jenny Calendar.

Well, for a start, I always hated that they're so… repetitive. Brimming with the same stories, again and again, like tin cans of stale 7 11 soup, stamped with enticing labels. Serving suggestion: one beatific kid, innocent; one parent, best if uptight and patronising. Warning: contains large quantities of saccharine, over-consumption may result in nausea and vomiting, as well as the risk of detachment from reality later in life. You can always tell a kid who's been told fairy tales early in their life, when they're too young to struggle away, too naïve to think for themselves.

I wasn't too young, thank God. I was old enough to realise that those exotic stories, set in Arabia and Persia and magic lands inside tree trunks, weren't created by inspired gods. They were written when the old men in the camp were sitting around the heap of burning trash that passed for a bonfire and, after a few shots of cheap whisky and maybe a joint or two, they'd edited the variables in the fairy tale formula, cynical enough to ignore the poisonous magic they were feeding their kids. Exotic, my Romany ass.

I'd say sucks to the people who really believed that sultans and viziers wrote them, or had met the people who wrote them, or even existed – then again, they might do. I never went to any of those places, either. I'd say it, except… well, the only people who really did believe it were the little, little kids, right? And I grew up to the ancient creed that while a kid can say sucks to anyone and everyone, a non-kid doing the same identifies as a target for attack. (I stopped thinking that after I became a teacher, for obvious reasons. Just goes to show how deep _that _creed really ran.) And boy, can gypsy kids attack. I took part in more than a few of those attacks, myself; sort of enjoyed the rush of belonging, being one of the kids. I didn't stick around long enough to become a target; not over there, anyway. I was always the smart one, the one who went along to Aunt Elka's house and sat and listened to her ramble on about mythology and herbology and other things that certain Congressmen would term Pagan Icons. If I'd ever grown up there, become an adult in a camp of kids… like _hell _would I have been a target. Of course, I avoided being made a target by becoming a computer science teacher – a _female _computer science teacher – in an American high school. On the Hellmouth. Tracking a broody and as-it-turns-out-not-very-effectively-ensouled ex-scourge of Europe. Oh, yeah. I was smart.

Anyway. Fairytales. The fake kind, not the real, more depressing kind.

They always seemed to have… blondes. Lots of blondes. Blondes with long, flowing hair and a pastel personality. This always confused me a little bit, because the only blondes around the camp were the ones who'd slipped out to buy the occasional clandestine bottle of peroxide. Some girls debated this point, and concluded, after a terribly thrilling wait, that dark hair was just fine, as long as the other criteria were met. Two out of three ain't bad, after all.

That was the reason I first cut my hair short.

And then I moved to America – still doing what my family told me to do, like a good little girl, but a couple of thousand miles from most of them. I learned computer science. I taught computer science. There aren't many fairies involved in that; not that I discovered, anyway. I guess it _was _the Hellmouth, and Rupert would never tell me whether or not the computers, like everything else there, were supernaturally-inclined.

Rupert. My knight in shining glasses. If my life had been a fairy tale, then he would have saved me from the demons and my family and my duty, but he couldn't do that. No, that sounds too bitter; he _had _to use me, use my skills, my knowledge, banishing demons and trying to ensoul vampires and using the computer to help save the world. He could have kept me safe, moved away from Sunnydale with me to start a new life far from the monsters. I offered it to him, one night in that summer after the Master went to hell. We'd been listening to a combination of classic rock and folk music in his apartment, and drinking a few glasses of wine, and talking about grown-up things, and I'd lived knowing about monsters all my life but that one night I was just so scared, and I asked him, told him, move away with me! It doesn't matter that we don't know each other, that we aren't married or in a relationship or even very good friends, yet, but we need to leave this hell or it'll… it'll consume us!

Yes, I said it. I blame the wine, or maybe the soft summer evening, or maybe just the fear. If my life had been a fairy tale, then he would have swept me onto his noble charger and galloped away with me, into the scarlet Californian sunset. But it wasn't, and he didn't. He caught my eye, and raised his glass in a kind of toast to the life us Scoobies could never lead, even the old ones, and we said no more about it.

If my life had been a fairy tale, Rupert would have swept in at the last minute, swept me off my feet and away from Angelus. If my life had been a fairy tale, I would have made him leave, or maybe even just listened to myself when I thought, more than once: to hell with this, to hell with this life. I'll leave. I will.

Maybe tomorrow.

But that's all a little long-winded for _my_ obituary.

Jennifer Calender (Jenny if you like, Jenna if you must, Kalderash if you have a death wish.) No-one remembers when she was born. No-one wants to think about when she died. She always wanted to leave her duties behind, but never quite got round to it, maybe because she was lazy (although her long-suffering students would say otherwise) or maybe because of a certain older English man, or maybe because some duties you can never leave behind.

And she hated fairy tales.


End file.
